Horowitz: How can I celebrate a Jewish liberation story while Gaza is starving?

Adam Horowitz writes:

Check out this amazing letter from the Israeli peace activist Nurit Peled-Elhanan. She sent it to the recipients of the Sakharov Prize. Peled-Elhanan helped start the organization the Bereaved Families Forum, a
network of Palestinian and Israeli parents who have lost children due
to the conflict, after her 13-year-old daughter Smadar was killed by a suicide bomber in 1997. Jewish Peace News sent this out today. Powerful stuff:

And personally I would add that these actions shake the foundations of Judaism itself as well. Peled-Elhanan's words resonate deeply for me as a Jew, and give expression to why I
find it increasingly difficult to join the Jewish community in a
communal setting. How can we remember, let alone celebrate, the story of Hanukkah
while Gaza is dying? While cities are cut off from electricity, from
water, from food? When does this policy expand beyond the simple, if
horrendous, actions of a state, and become the reflection of a people?
A people who, if not actively celebrating and promoting this barbaric
behavior (and there are those doing that), are sitting idly by while
others are forced to starve in their name?

Peled-Elhanan's letter reminds me of Marc Ellis's writings on Jewish theology and the challenge of Jews as oppressors. Ellis has often quoted Rabbi Irving Greenberg
as a central figure in "holocaust theology." He quotes Greenberg: "no
statement theological or otherwise should be made that would not be
credible in the presence of the burning children." Translation: every facet of Jewish life has to be understood in the context of,
and justified against, the Holocaust (see Avraham Burg). Ellis amends Greenberg by taking his theology from the particular to the universal. In Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation, he says:

As
risky and problematic as it is, we are called today to the wilderness;
but the call is a promise of liberation. Chastened by history, we can
no longer see liberation as the omnipotent preserve of God hovering
over us by day and leading us by night, or simply as the search for the
empowerment of our own people in America and Israel. We can ill afford such innocence in the presense of burning children, whether they be in Poland or in Palestine.

I carry these words with me. No statement about
Israel/Palestine, about our "progressive" tradition as Jews, about the
incoming administration's foreign policy, or about (yet another) Jewish holiday
that commemorates overcoming oppression should be made that would not be credible
in the presence of the people of Gaza. People who are being subjected
to collective punishment, to a human-made natural disaster. This is not just a stain on Israel, but a stain on all of us.

Here's the entire letter from the Sakharov Foundation website:

Dear President,

Dear Vice President,

Dear Sakharov Prize winners,

I apologize for not being able to attend such an important event.

These
words are dedicated to the heroes of Gaza, the mothers and fathers and
children, the teachers and doctors and nurses who are proving every day
and every hour that no fortified wall can imprison the free spirit of
humanity and no form of violence can subdue life.

The
pogrom being carried out by the thugs of the Occupation army against
the residents of the Gaza Strip is known to everyone and yet the world
is impotent as always. I call upon all of us, who have won a privilege
as well as duty by receiving the Sakharov prize, to arise and go to
Gaza and any other city of oppression and slaughter; to defy all
blockades and high walls and not to give up until all barriers are
broken.

When
Jewish poet Bialik wrote after the Pogrom against the Jews in
Kishiniev, "Satan has not yet created Vengeance for the blood of a
small child," It did not occur to him that the child would be a
Palestinian child from Gaza and his slaughterers would be Jewish
soldiers. And when he wrote:

Let the blood pierce

through the abyss!  Let the blood seep

down into the depths of darkness, and

eat away there, in the dark, and breach

all the rotting foundations of the earth.

He
did not imagine that those foundations would be the foundations of the
state of Israel. That the Jewish and Democratic State of Israel would
demagogically use the expression "blood on his hands" to justify its
refusal to release freedom fighters, children and peace leaders from
the worst of prisons, while immersing all of us in the blood of
innocent babes up to our necks, up to our nostrils, so that every
breath we take sends red bubbles of blood into the air of the Holy Land.

But
the siege of Gaza is only one of many sieges imposed today in the world
by democratic powers as well as by non-democratic ones. All those
sieges are meant for one purpose: to silence the voice of freedom and
justice.

My
co-laureate of the Sakharov Prize, Prof. Izzat Gazzawi, who died of
humiliation less than two years after receiving this prestigious award,
wrote to me just before his heart surrendered, that he believed the
Israeli soldiers who came to his house every night to break furniture
and frighten the children wanted to silence his voice. I have vowed
then as I believe we  should all vow every day, to do everything within
our power so that his and other such brave voices will not be silenced.

Today,
when the most enlightened civilizations commit the most heinous crimes
against innocent defenseless people out of greed, megalomania and pure
racism we should listen once more to Bialik's cry from a hundred years
ago:

"And I, my heart is dead, no longer is there prayer

on my lips;

All strength is gone, and

hope is no more.

Until when,

How much longer,

Until when?"

And
then follow the example of people like Hu Jia, today's laureate of the
Sakharov prize who is held in prison for dedicating every moment of his
life to end the miseries of the family of man.

With my best regards,

Nurit Peled-Elhanan

15.12 2008